The processes tapped by the widely-used word association (WA) paradigm remain a matter of debate: while some authors consider them as driven by lexical co-occurrences, others emphasize the role of meaning-based connections. To test these contrastive hypotheses, we analyzed responses in a WA task in terms of their normative defining features (those…

In experiments investigating the processing of true and false negative sentences, it is often reported that polarity interacts with truth-value, in the sense that true sentences lead to faster reaction times than false sentences in affirmative conditions whereas the same does not hold for negative sentences. Various reasons for this difference…

Two main mechanisms, articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing, are argued to be involved in the maintenance of verbal information in working memory (WM). Whereas converging research has suggested that rehearsal promotes the phonological representations of memoranda in working memory, little is known about the representations that…

In 4 word-translation experiments, we examined the different representational frameworks theory (Crutch & Warrington, 2005; 2010) that concrete words are represented primarily by category, whereas abstract words are represented by association. In our experiments, Chinese-English bilingual speakers were presented with an auditory Chinese word…

Functional imaging studies of single word production have consistently reported activation of the lateral prefrontal and cingulate cortex. Its contribution has been shown to be sensitive to task demands, which can be manipulated by the degree of response specification. Compared with classical verbal fluency, free word association relies less on…